Aquarium

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There was almost no snow left outside. Everything soaked, every patch of lawn swelled, slush in the gutters, ribbons of black. Even the pavement and buildings looked fat with water. Clouds bending downward, gray and darker gray, nothing white. I was one of the only walkers. Everyone drove.

East Yesler Way didn’t seem like it was in a city. Lined with two-story apartment complexes, with front yards that looked like backyards, some of them littered with plastic toys and laundry and thrown-away furniture but most looking tidy enough behind their chain-link fences. Smokers standing in the cold, watching me pass. Maybe it did look like a city. Just not downtown, even though we were close.

Almost every day someone was moving in or out. And they could be anyone, any race or age, with or without kids. Like one big motel, that entire long street, built for no one’s dream. I didn’t like East Yesler Way because no one belonged, but for some reason I never walked down one of the other streets. I had a pathway, a route, as unthinking as the sharks that circled like monks. I felt safe, at least, in my big jacket, and no one bothered me, which I find amazing when I look back on it now. I Google the street and see the crime rate at three times the national average, car theft almost six times higher. I think of my mother and the teachers at school letting me walk that route every day, and I’m filled with a rage that will never go away because it comes from some hollow vertigo unfinished. I feel dizzy with fear for my former self, and how can that be? I’m here now. I’m safe. I have a job. I’m thirty-two years old. I live in a better section of town. I should forgive and forget.

The only thing that kept me moving along that street each afternoon was the blue at the end, the sea visible because we were on a hill. That blue promised the aquarium. A gauntlet leading to a sanctuary. I could have stayed in an after-school program, but it was my choice to visit the fish. They were emissaries sent from a larger world. They were the same as possibility, a kind of promise.

When I crossed over the freeway, downtown began. The hill slanting downward, large buildings shaped like wedges burrowed into the hill, hiding in their own caves. Hunched for safety, as if something enormous swam in the skies above. One brave skyscraper at the end with a pointy top, trying not to look soft. The entire city a colony like coral, made of an endless network of small chambers. I imagined each room a polyp, a creature without a spine, tentacled mouth looking up toward the sky, finding a place to sit and excreting its exoskeleton, a thin layer of concrete, to attach itself here forever, at each full moon waving its tentacles upward and releasing gametes, fairy creatures made of light, each of them a new room floating through the air, looking for a place to build itself.

And so the city would grow without end, but why here? This was no Bali or Belize. Cold, raining all the time, windy, overcast, and dark. Seattle never made sense to me. We had orcas, and beautiful islands I had never seen, called the San Juans, but why the city?

I walked along the ferry terminal, the large green and white ferries that went to these islands, and I wished my mother was free and had money and we could ride north on the water. We would never stop but would just keep voyaging all over the world, across to Japan and down to the Philippines, from island to island, learning to dive, visiting every reef.

I passed fireboats and private yachts, the same private yachts that were always at the dock, never used, always waiting, owned by people with money who never left either, caught somewhere in the city. The waterfront park and then the aquarium. I had a yearly pass, but they all recognized me here and I never had to show it. I just walked in, as if it were my home.

I found him at the darkest tank, in a corner, alone, peering through what could have been a window to the stars, endless black and cold and only a few points of light. Hung in this void like a small constellation, the ghost pipefish, impossible.

Like a leaf giving birth to stars, I said, whispering, as if any sound might make the fish vanish.

Yes, the old man whispered back. Exactly that. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Sometimes I can’t believe you’re only twelve. You should become an ichthyologist. This is who you are.

Body of small green leaves, veined, very thin, its fins painted in light cast from elsewhere, but from his eye out his long snout, an eruption of galaxies without foreign source, born in the fish itself. An opening in the small fabric of the world, a place to fall into endlessly.

He’s my favorite fish, I said, still whispering. I ask everyone what their favorite fish is, and I always hope they’ll say the ghost pipefish.

Well he’s my favorite now, because of what you’ve said. The old man looked up at the signs above the tank. Randall Halimeda Ghost Pipefish.

A light flutter of fins, and the fish turned away, became nearly invisible, so thin, suspended in nothing. Some days I waited here and never saw him, only a black tank nearly empty, a dark wall of rock in shadow, a few drab seaweeds along the bottom, camouflage he never used, as if he knew all was staged and no predator coming. This tank could seem like nothing, and then it could dazzle.

Well, the old man said. You see that and it’s hard to care about the others. And I have to say, I’m surprised at how many fish here don’t look like fish. A leaf giving birth to stars is exactly right, and you’d never see that on your plate.

I don’t eat fish, I said.

No, no. I shouldn’t either. I’ll stop.

I love them too much.

Yes.

What was your favorite fish until today?

I come from Louisiana. Long ago. And they have giant catfish there, fish you wouldn’t believe, living down in the mud. They’d never get one in this aquarium. The real world is too big.

What do they look like? I’ve only seen regular catfish, and small tropical ones from the Amazon, white with black spots.

These are plain. Dark backs, black or brown, rough-looking with some spots, but no regular pattern. White bellies, an obscene white like fat. They look almost like tadpoles, baby frogs, because the belly is so big and rounded and the rest of the body in one long slab, much slimmer. And it doesn’t look like flesh. It looks like yuck, like whatever makes frog. But it’s hundreds of pounds, longer than a person and much thicker. With stubby little front fins like arms that didn’t grow. Long white tendrils around a big hole of a mouth.

It sounds awful. Why is it your favorite?

Because they make dinosaurs possible. If you look long enough at a catfish that big, and think of it lying around in a shallow muddy river, you can imagine the huge leg of a dinosaur stepping into that river. You can go back a hundred million or two hundred million years and touch the world before we existed. Those catfish are leftovers.

I want to see one.

Well maybe someday we’ll go to Louisiana together.

I want to go now.

Me too. We could travel and see a lot together. Mexico, maybe, and see manta rays doing backflips.

Really?

Yeah. They leap out of the water there, doing backward somersaults. You wouldn’t believe it. Huge manta rays, and you can see fifty of them, or a hundred, all at one time. The Sea of Cortez.

Promise you’ll take me there.

I will.